With the increase in pay television services, set-top boxes became popular, as an interface between a cable or satellite television network and a subscriber's television. With the advent of digital television, the importance of set-top boxes remains high, and television providers strive to maintain leading-edge features in the set-top boxes they provide to subscribers. In fact, advanced set-top box functionality can provide a competitive advantage for a television provider. Accordingly, many television providers supply subscribers with upgradeable set-top boxes, which can be reprogrammed and/or updated as the provider develops new features or fixes bugs in the set-top box software.
Such updates cannot be provided until they have been thoroughly tested, however. Typically, software is first tested in set-top boxes installed in a lab. This technique, however, requires a large number of set-top boxes installed in a lab, and the great variety in hardware models and software levels in deployed set-top boxes only exacerbates this problem, as a provider must maintain a huge inventory of test boxes to ensure that software updates will not break some models. At any given time, however, there are a vast number of inactive production set-top boxes installed at subscriber premises. (As used herein, the term “inactive,” as applied to a set-top box, means a set-top box that is not currently engaged in providing services to a subscriber. Such an inactive set-top box might be in a sleep state, powered off, or powered on). It would be useful to be able to employ such inactive set-top boxes for testing purposes. Currently, however no facility exists to support such features.